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I was appalled to learn that the beautiful Broadway actress, Diana Huey, was dealing with disgusting racist comments about being an Asian American cast in the role of my favorite princess in the touring production of The Little Mermaid. The play had a short-lived run on Broadway in 2007 before several songs were cut and a few were added for the tour. Diana is one of many women to portray Ariel, but one of very few women of color to do so. A few days ago, she wrote a beautiful Facebook post highlighting her concerns on the matter, which made me love her even more. I think she makes a beautiful mermaid princess. The Broadway stage is notoriously color blind. It values singing, dancing, and acting skills above all else. Princesses come in all colors, shapes and sizes.

Princess stories have a long history of being portrayed onstage. One of the most famous productions is Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, which debuted as a live TV special starring Julie Andrews in 1957. The show …

Have you ever wished you could put on a princess dress and fly away to a magical realm where anything is possible? The Labyrinth Masquerade Ball is the closest thing you can get to that, and it just came back to the Millenium Biltmore Hotel here in Los Angeles for its twentieth year! My husband I had the pleasure of being among its may attendees last night. As a bonus, it even gave me a rare excuse to wear my wedding dress again. I was surprised how many compliments I got on it, considering how many elaborate fantasy and faery costumes there were.

Beginning in 1997, the Labyrinth of Jareth was inspired by the masquerade scene featuring the late David Bowie in Jim Henson's 1986 film, Labyrinth. In order to recreate the dreamlike quality of the film, the event requires all attendees to wear either formal attire and masks or elaborate fantasy costumes. People go all out for this each year, donning tons of glittery, enormous wings, face paint, light-up props, and anything else you cou…

Yesterday, I talked about how much fun it can be to dress up as a princess for a day. Meeting princesses can be just as much fun. In fact, it's my absolute favorite thing to do when I visit the Disney Parks. I have an endless library of photos I've had taken with all of the Disney Princesses. It is the closest thing to being able to hang out with a cartoon character in real life. Disney performers are also not allowed to tell people that they play a character and must instead say that they are "friends" with that character, making the magic of meeting them feel that much more authentic.

I have visited both American Disney parks countless times, and I have also been to Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris. I've seen the parks go through many changes over the years, mostly for the better. Princesses have grown exponentially in popularity, so Walt Disney World and Disneyland have been working hard to accommodate for this by building nicer rooms to meet the princess…

Earlier this year, ABC made an announcement that they would be airing a special tonight featuring live performances of Disney's The Little Mermaid called The Little Mermaid Live! The special was presumably to follow in the footsteps of a tradition NBC reinstated with Peter Pan LIVE! in 2014 in which they would air a live performance of a well-known musical once a year. Appropriately enough, this tradition started with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella in 1957 starring Julie Andrews as Cinderella. Julie just celebrated her 82nd birthday two days ago. FOX tried their hand at copying this tradition last year with Grease Live! to underwhelming success. I guess as the parent company of Disney, which is known for their musicals, ABC felt obligated to get the ball rolling on their own version of this.

Before we begin, I'd like to wish a very happy birthday to Jodi Benson, the voice of my favorite princess. Jodi is a regular attendee of the D23 Expo, and I was fortunate enough to see her perform there during the Disney Legend Awards ceremony. I've been talking about princess-themed events lately, and there's no bigger Disney Princess fan event out there than D23. It is the official convention for Disney fans that takes place at the Anaheim Convention Center every other year. The expo is the one chance that fans get to interact with the people who worked on their favorite movies and preview ones that are still in production. I have been to three of the five expos that have taken place since 2009. They also have a huge interactive exhibit floor where they sell new merchandise, display artwork, costumes, and props from movies, and hold autograph signings. It is the ultimate experience for any Disney fan.

D23 is the name of the official Disney fan club that the company estab…

Earlier today, Disney Cruise Lines shared a sneak preview of their new Beauty and the Beast show on Facebook. Performances of the show started on the Disney Dream ship this past Monday. Beauty and the Beast has already had tons of stage adaptations including a pretty long run on Broadway a few years after the 1991 movie came out. It also had a smaller stage show at the theme park formerly known as MGM Studios in Florida. Considering everything that came before it, the new show runs the risk of coming off as a tired rehash. Fortunately, it introduces a new aesthetic based heavily on the 2017 live-action remake that prevents it from feeling like a copycat of its former incarnations. The new production also uses the aesthetic of cogs and gears from Maurice's music boxes to transition between scenes.

Broadway shows generally have a run time of two and a half hours, while theme park shows are closer to a half-hour or forty-five minutes. Cruise shows lie somewhere in the middle, so this…

It's a big month for princess movies. Last week was the 28th anniversary of my favorite movie, The Little Mermaid. As I've discussed in a previous post, Disney is going all out this month to celebrate the 80th anniversary of their very first movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. On Monday night, Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City put on a live show to unveil their gorgeous window displays honoring the film. The displays are similar to the ones at the Emporium at the Disney Parks, but much larger in scale. They portray detailed animatronics of every major scene in the movie, from the wishing well to the fated kiss, as well as the new clothing designed specifically for the event.

The special, called "Once Upon a Holiday," was streamed live on YouTube and social media. Fans crowded around Fifth Avenue to see the Saks Fifth Avenue president give a moving speech about the film, followed by a choreographed performance from the Seven Dwarfs. Sofia Carson, who plays the Ev…

Happy New Year, princess fans! I took a brief hiatus from Story Saturday over the holidays, but I'm back with more princess updates for you. Did you do anything exciting to celebrate the new year? I attended a dinner show at Medieval Times last night. It was a great way to ring in 2018. Last New Year's Eve, I went to Pirate's Dinner Adventure. While both shows have a princess in them and are set up very similarly, I believe that the Pirate's Dinner Adventure has more to offer to princess fans and in general. Both dinner experiences assign your party a color that determines which section of the room you will be sitting in and which knight or pirate you will be cheering for. Over the course of the show, wait staff in era-appropriate costumes serve food and drink while attempting not to interrupt your enjoyment of the main event.

The reason I think that Pirate's Dinner Adventure is superior to Medieval Times is that it tells more of a story and contains more dazzling …

In 2003, an amazing stage show based on the 1992 animated classic opened at Disney's California Adventure park called Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular. Sadly, that show recently closed in 2016 and was replaced with a Frozen stage show. Now the only opportunity to see an official Disney stage production of Aladdin rests in the hands of the 2014 Broadway play, which I saw on tour tonight at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. This new musical production barely had a chance of winning my favor in my heart because I was already such a huge fan of the retired Disneyland version. My low expectations were barely met. I found the new musical to be inferior to the Disneyland show in every possible way.

I had a pleasant experience with the theater itself. It was my first time at the Pantages, even though I've lived in California for over seven years. The layout is very similar to Disney's El Capitan Theatre, where they screen the latest Disney movies. The theater staff was friendly, an…

I had a very interesting evening, celebrating the release of the Entwined Tales series on Facebook with the six lovely authors of the books from the series. I've never seen a release party quite like this before, but then, I've never seen a book series quite like this either. Each author has her own independent set of fairy tale novels, which brought them together based on their similar story content. They combined their talents to create an original series about a bumbling fairy godfather who goes around granting unwanted gifts to princesses from six different fairy tales. Some of the fairy tales they picked are rather obscure, such as "The Goose Girl" and "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," (which was turned into a live-action movie called The Polar Bear King in 1991, but I wasn't a fan of it). Of course, the one I'm looking forward to the most is inspired by my favorite fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid." On March 5th, A Little Mermaid b…

Change is not always a good thing. When it came to the Disney Parks of old, Walt only wanted to make changes that would support the advancement of technology, new movies, and the overall enjoyment of his guests. For a very long time after his passing, his philosophy seemed to remain in tact. In 2013, Walt Disney World did a complete redesign of their outdated Fantasyland in Florida. New Fantasyland was everything a modern princess could possibly want from a Disney park, with gorgeous real-life reproductions of locations from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast along with stunning new rides featuring the latest in animatronic technology. Unfortunately, happy endings last forever, and many of the changes that the parks have made since then have not been for the betterment of the guests. Instead, they came as a result of business partnerships and corporate greed. These changes range from insane price hikes to the recent closing of my favorite restaurant in Disney's California…

Where can you go to get transported to the time of princesses and knights and have a whole lot of fun too? The Renaissance Faire, of course! If you've never been to a Faire before, you should definitely go at least once. It's a great opportunity to get out of the house and meet other fantasy aficionados while also having fun with history. Today I attended the opening weekend of The Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Irwindale, California. It was my second time attending this particular Faire. They had many of the same booths, activities, and shows that I assume come back every year. This time, instead of wearing my generic Renaissance dress that I made in high school, I decided to cosplay with my husband as the Fairytale Designer versions of Ariel and Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid.

It was particularly fun to cosplay during opening weekend because most people save their character costumes for theme weekends. We got a lot of attention from fans of the movie who recogni…

As you may or may not be aware, there was a pretty big screening of Disney's Beauty and the Beast at the Hollywood Bowl this past Friday and Saturday. I wasn't there, so I can't give you a direct account of the experience like I did with their Little Mermaid concert, but I can save you a few hours of searching through social media and YouTube videos by summarizing my own findings. If you're wondering why I didn't bother buying tickets this year, it was a combination having already experienced my favorite movie at the Hollywood Bowl and not wanting to see Zooey Deschanel attempting to recreate Belle's soprano. To be honest, I wasn't even aware that she could sing before the casting announcements for this event were made. If they didn't want to cast the original voices from the movie, why couldn't they just get Susan Egan to play Belle? It shouldn't count that she did it on Broadway since Norm Lewis reprised his Broadway role as King Triton at the…

Some of you may recall reading about my experiences at the Broadway Princess Party last December at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa. The show has picked up a lot of momentum since then. It now has a pages on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They have also extended their tour to even more venues across the country than ever. I didn't have a dire need to see the show again, but it was hard to resist when I learned that it was coming a local venue at half the price and encouraging cosplay with the incentive of prizes. Last night, I donned my Sofia the First dress, amulet, and tiara and headed out to Hollywood Improv to meet with a friend and see how the show has changed over the past few months.

There was a big announcement made earlier today that Tokyo DisneySea, my favorite theme park in the whole world, is getting a big expansion that will include life-sized replicas of locations from Tangled, Frozen, and Peter Pan! This is a huge deal. If you've never been to Tokyo DisneySea, you might not realize the scope of such an announcement. Essentially, Tokyo DisneySea is paradise on Earth. Everything they build looks both natural and magical at the same time. Even the Fantasyland expansion at Walt Disney World from five years ago doesn't compare to this. It was pretty amazing that they built facades of the castles from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast along with some of Belle's village, but they were still just facades. Tokyo doesn't do facades. They either go big or go home.

This incredible themed port is expected to be completed by 2022. It is reported to be the largest expansion to Tokyo DisneySea ever and will include Arendelle Castle, Rapunzel'…

At the beginning of the year, I made a post comparing Medieval Times to the similarly themed Pirate's Dinner Adventure. Shortly afterward, I learned that the dinner show at Medieval Times was being rewritten with a queen serving as hostess to replace the king and princess who had led the event in the past. The new plot revolved around the king dying in a war and his daughter taking over the kingdom as queen. It replaced the old version of the show little by little throughout the year at the various Medieval Times castles throughout the country. The actors who played the king retired and the actresses who played the princess were promoted to queen. I knew I needed to see this feminist revival of the story that boasted a new script, new costumes, new lighting, and new music, so I made plans to go back for my birthday. Today, I watched Queen Doña Maria Isabella take her place on the throne to assert her power during the traditional jousting tournament.

"That's From Disneyland!" is a free pop-up exhibit at the Van Eaton Galleries all this month. It's now in its final few days, but you can still pop by for a quick look if you're local to Los Angeles. The display is an impressive collection of park paraphernalia from a man named Richard Kraft, who somehow managed to store wall-sized paintings, ride vehicles, and more in his home before offering it to the gallery for a limited time public display. When I got in the long line to see it, Richard made his way all the way down to the end to greet everyone and welcome them to see his collection. He asked what we were most looking forward to seeing, but no one was prepared to answer that since none of us had been inside yet. So, he gave a pop quiz and asked which of the following three items was not part of his collection: A Dumbo ride vehicle, a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride vehicle, or an Autopia ride vehicle. The lady behind me correctly guessed the Autopia one, and then h…

Yesterday, my husband and I attended Mickey's Halloween Party at Disneyland to meet up with some friends. It wasn't my first time attending this event, but they had changed a few things since the last time I went. A ticket to Mickey's Halloween Party now grants admission to both Disneyland Park and Disney's California Adventure from three hours before the start time of the party until both parks close. The Florida equivalent of the event is Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, which I've also been to several times. One of the biggest benefits of these events was that they used to cover a half day in the parks including parking for slightly over half the price of a full-day ticket. Thanks to some unfortunate changes Disney has been making, admission is now practically the same as a full-day ticket and no longer includes parking. At least it gets you into both parks. The event itself is just as fun as ever. My husband and I attended dressed up as Fairytale Desi…

There are many ways to find immersive princess experiences at the Disney Parks. The most common way is through meet'n'greets. They let you interact with the princess in real life, allowing you to ask them any question you can think of and learn how they might respond, not to mention the terrific photo ops. Another way is through dark rides, which is the official term for the slower rides at the parks that allow you to travel through movie scenes that are recreated by animatronics, a revolutionary technology that bring sculptures to live with mechanical movement and programming. All of the dark rides at the Disney Parks use animatronics for their constantly moving characters. Until a few years ago, the only Disney Princess dark ride that could be experienced in this way was Snow White's Scary Adventures. This ride was overseen by Walt Disney himself and is one of the few remaining rides that opened with Disneyland's launch in 1955. Even though it feels a little dated n…

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

The internet went a little crazy when Entertainment Weekly released Disney's first promo photos of the fully costumed actors from their upcoming Aladdin remake last week. Many were disappointed with what they saw, which unfortunately tends to be the case for live-action remakes. For instance, Aladdin's signature purple vest was changed to red, making it closer to the Broadway version of the show. He was also given a relatively nice shirt underneath, which is more than a little confusing for those of us who remember how poor he was in the original film. Will Smith as the Genie looked a little too much like a normal human instead of a mystical blue entity, but apparently that's still coming. Princess fans were most excited to see previews of Jasmine's wardrobe. In terms of quantity, the internet did not disappoint. We now have images of three of Jasmine's looks that will be featured in the movie as well as a peek at her new handmaiden.

In my "Little Mermaid" origins post, I mentioned that there were three live-action movies in the works based on the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since then, a few announcements have been made about all three of these movies. One of them has a theatrical release date, and it's sooner than you might think. The circus-themed indie movie that's had a trailer out for several years now is coming to select AMC theaters on August 17th. That's in two months! I wish I could be more excited about it, but the plot looks a lot closer to the 2006 tongue-in-cheek teen mermaid movie Aquamarine than the fairy tale that it's named after. The trailer focuses on how a little girl's belief in mermaids has the potential to save the aquatic heroine who is held captive in a tank at a carnival. I've been feeling indifferent about this adaptation ever since the first trailer was released, but it's nice to know that I will have the option to see it on the big scree…

Sofia the First, everyone's favorite princess-in-training, has met every official Disney Princess that existed when her show began with the sole exception of Pocahontas. The power of her purple amulet granted her the ability to summon famous princesses whenever she was in trouble. Technically, she never met Anna either, but the episode "Olaf and the Tale of Miss Nettle" implied that she was supposed to meet her but got Olaf instead because her amulet was on the fritz. About a year ago, her amulet turned pink and granted her new powers. It now sends her to help princesses, meaning that the chances of her meeting Pocahontas at this point are virtually nonexistent. Why did they acknowledge every other princess movie except this one? Actually, they did acknowledge the 1995 animated classic in an episode of Sofia, but it was very subtle.

In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …